Global Swarming Honeybees: Surprise, Surprise! Pesticides Toxic to Honeybees Found in Pollen

2.04.2009

Surprise, Surprise! Pesticides Toxic to Honeybees Found in Pollen

A new report from researchers at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station has found 37 different types of pesticides in the pollen collected by honeybees in several sites in Connecticut. The research took place in 2007 and is now available in summarized form as a PowerPoint document.

The researchers found the following in the pollen samples they collected from the bee hives:

15 different insecticides and acaricides (acaricides—a.k.a. "miticides" are used to treat Varroa mite)...
11 fungicides...
10 herbicides...
1 plant-growth regulator...

& (sing it with me!) a profoundly poisoned partridge in a pear tree.

The researchers state that "...insecticides highly toxic to honeybees are...found in pollen frequently or at high levels." As we used to say back in the 1970s, gag me with a spoon.

And while we're on the unpleasant and urgent topic of how we're screwing our precious honeybees with our overuse of pesticides and what-all, check out this undated document entitled, Protecting Honeybees from Pesticide Poisoning.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Thanks for posting this. Alas, everytime I open a jar honey I wonder, what really is in this?; February 5, 2009 at 1:38 PM

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Quotes of Note

"The cynicism that you have is not your real soul."—Yoko Ono
"The country that elected George Bush — sort of — because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance."—Gail Collins
"How do you inherit the earth? By being awake."—Joni Mitchell
Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form.”—Judith Coche
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."—Philip K. Dick
"A meddling beekeeper is said to be the bees' worst enemy, and this may be true."—Ormond Aebi, The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping
"For too long we have been locked in an old fashioned, reductionist approach, dealing with bees as if they were mere machines created solely for our benefit, instead of highly evolved, wild creatures, with which we are privileged to work."—Phil Chandler, The Barefoot Beekeeper
"Neither among the bees nor any other animals that have a ray of our intellect, do things happen with the precision our books record. Too many circumstances remain unknown to us."—Maurice Maeterlinck
"In these times, acceleration spoils everything."—Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musicologist
"Whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt."—Barbara Kingsolver
"Healthy, happy bees don't need any additives."—Dee A. Lusby
"When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."—Audubon
"There is a certain valid moment for every cloud."—Paul Strand

"For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people—a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance."—Wm. Longgood, The Queen Must Die